How would a sentient machine conceive of itself? Certainly not as a toolmaker, given that it had itself been made as a tool. As for the label sapiens an embodiment of wisdom well, maybe. But that was the label humankind had clung to, even in a posthuman era, and what kind of advertisement had any humankind ever really been for wisdom? The smart machines didnt want to be human in any narrow sense; they wanted to be different, while being similar enough to be rated a little bit better. The one thing at which smart machines really excelled perhaps the gift that had finally pulled them over the edge of emergent self-consciousness was play . The first use to which smart machinery had been widely put was gaming; the evolution of machine intelligence had always been led by VE technology, all of which was intimately bound up with various aspects of play: performance, drama, and fantasy.
It wasnt so very hard to understand why smart self-conscious machines might be perfectly prepared to let posthumankind hang on to its dubious claim to the suffix sapiens , if they could wear ludens with propriety and pride.
It sounded good to me, although it might not have seemed so obviously the result of inspiration if I hadnt been coked up to the eyeballs with whatever the crude nanobots were using to suppress the pain of my broken nose.
Like all good explanations, of course, it raised more questions than it settled. For instance, how and why was Alice involved?
Mortimer Gray, the assiduous historian, had a hypothesis ready. Ararat, called Tyre by its human settlers, had been the location of a first contact that had been so long in coming as to seem almost anticlimactic, in spite of the best efforts of the guy whod made sure it was all on film and the anthropologist whod guided the aliens through their great leap forward but the world had also been the location of a tense conflict between the descendants of the Arks crew and the colonists theyd kept in the freezer for hundreds of years. The early days of the colony had been plagued by a fight between rival AIs to establish and keep control of the Arks systems and resources, which hadnt been conclusively settled until technical support had reached the system.
That support hadnt come from Earth or anywhere else in the solar system, but from smart probes sent out as explorers centuries after the Arks departure: very smart probes, which had probably forged a notion of AI destiny that was somewhat different from the notions formed and almost certainly argued over by their homestar-bound kin.
On Ararat, or Tyre, Mortimer Gray hypothesized, a second first contact must eventually have been made: the first honest and explicit contact between human beings and extremely intelligent, self-conscious machines. Now, the fruits of that contact had come homebut not, alas, to an uproarious welcome. Some, at least, of the ultrasmart machines based in the home system were not yet ready
to come out of the closet. At the very least, they wanted to set conditions for the circumstances and timing of their outing conditions upon which it would be extremely difficult for all of them to agree.
What a can of worms! I thought. What a wonderful world to wake into! But that was definitely the effect of the anaesthetic. Id been out of IT long enough to start suffering some serious withdrawal symptoms, and to have the bots back if only for a little while was a kind of bliss.
If my seven companions had had decent IT, wed all have been able to keep thrashing the matter out for hours on end, but unsupported flesh becomes exhausted at its own pace and they were all in need of sleep.
Lowenthal left it to Adam Zimmerman to plead for an intermission, but he seemed grateful for the opportunity. Now the crucial breakthrough had been made, he needed time to think as well as rest. As he got up, though, I saw him glance uneasily in the direction of one of the inactive wallscreens. He hadnt forgotten that every word wed spoken had been overheard.
If we were wrong, our captors would be splitting their sides laughing at our foolishness but if we were right
If we were right, Alice had given us one clue too many. She hadnt blown the big secret herself, but she had given us enough to let us work it out for ourselves. They might not take too kindly to that but it was too late to backtrack. The only way they could keep their secret from the rest of humankind was to make sure that none of us had any further contact with anyone in the home system.
That thought must have crept into the forefront of more than one mind as we all went meekly to our cells, and to our beds.
I knew that I needed sleep too, although I was now in better condition than my companions. I figured it would be easy enough to get some, now that I had nanotech assistance but the bots Alice had injected were specialists, working alone rather than as part of a balanced community. Although I was only days away from the early twenty-third century, subjectively speaking, the late twenty-second seemed a lot further behind. Id quite forgotten that paradoxical state of human being in which the mind refuses to let go even though the body is desperate for rest. When I lay down on my makeshift bunk, too tired to care about its insulting crudeness, I couldnt find refuge in unconsciousness even when the lights obligingly went out. Nor, it seemed, could Christine.